The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

True, we feel a measure of relief when we learn that the Tactical Center on this occasion was not an organization; that it did not have: (1) statutes; (2) a program; (3) membership dues. So, what did it have? Here’s what: They used to meet! (Goose-pimples up and down the back!) And when they met, they undertook to familiarize themselves with one another’s point of view! (Icy chills!)

But their most heinous acts were something else again. In the midst of the Civil War they wrote books, composed memoranda and projects. Yes, as experts in constitutional law, financial science, economic relationships, the system of justice, and education, they wrote works! (And, as one might easily guess, their works were not based on earlier works by Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin.)

Our accuser’s heart jumps right out of our chest, outrunning the sentence. Well, what punishment was adequate for these assistants to the general? Just one, of course—to be shot! That was not merely what the accuser demanded—it was the sentence of the tribunal. (Alas, it was later commuted to concentration camp until the end of the Civil War.) And indeed the defendants’ guilt consisted in the fact that they hadn’t sat in their own corners, sucking on their quarter-pound of bread; that “they had talked things over and reached agreements as to what the state structure should be after the fall of the Soviet regime.” In contemporary scientific language, this is known as the study of the alternative possibility.

“And even if the defendants here in Moscow did not lift a finger [and it looks very much as though that’s the way it was] at such a moment, nevertheless . . . even a conversation over a teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary act. . . . During the Civil War not only is any kind of action [against Soviet power] a crime . . . but the fact of inaction is also criminal.”64 Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear. They are being sentenced to death—for inaction. For a cup of tea. The Petrograd intellectuals, for example, decided that in the event of Yudenich’s taking the city, they would first of all “concern themselves with convening a democratic municipal Duma.” (In other words, to safeguard the city against a possible dictatorship.) Krylenko: “I would like to shout at them: ‘It was your duty to think first of all how you might die in battle, so as not to allow Yudenich into the city!’”

In addition, there were certain defendants who knew about all this talk and yet kept silent, did not write denunciations. (In our contemporary lingo: “He knew, but he didn’t tell.”)

As when a cinema projector starts slowing down, twenty-eight prerevolutionary male and female faces flicker past us in a film that’s fuzzy and askew. We didn’t notice their expressions! Were they frightened? Contemptuous? Proud? We don’t have their answers! Their last words are missing—because of “technical considerations.” But, making up for this lack, the accuser croons to us: “From beginning to end, it was self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed. The political instability and the interim nature of the intelligentsia . . . [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature] completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks.”65 I don’t know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the passion to save one’s life at any cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of the intelligentsia had still been maintained. . . . I don’t know.

F. The Case of Glavtop—May, 1921

This case was important because it involved engineers—or, as they had been christened in the terminology of the times, “specialists,” or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee.) Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories—strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame? Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the “comrades who were often brought in from outside”—i.e., the Communist leaders—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem.”1 And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had refigured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated!

The spetsy were to blame for everything. But the proletarian court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient. Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed spetsy remains in proletarian hearts—but one can’t get along without them; everything goes to rack and ruin. And the tribunal doesn’t persecute them, and Krylenko even says that from 1920 on “there is no question of any sabotage.” The spetsy are to blame, but not out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept; they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers. And so, at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a surprising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to the engineers.

G. The Case of the Suicide of Engineer Oldenborger (Tried before the Verkhtrib—the Supreme Tribunal—in February, 1922)

V. V. Oldenborger had worked for thirty years in the Moscow water-supply system and had evidently become its chief engineer back at the beginning of the century. Even though the Silver Age of art, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger’s water. The Acmeists and the Futurists, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, the military cadets and the Red Guards, the Council of People’s Commissars, the Cheka, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection—all had drunk Oldenborger’s pure cold water. He had never married and he had no children. His whole life had consisted of that one water-supply system.

But despite this, he was an enemy! Here’s what he had said to one of the workers: “The Soviet regime won’t last two weeks.” (There was a new political situation preceding the announcement of the New Economic Policy, and in this context Krylenko could allow himself some frank talk before the Verkhtrib: “It was not only the spetsy who thought that way at the time. That is what we ourselves thought more than once.”) But despite this, Oldenborger was an enemy! Just as Comrade Lenin had told us: to keep watch over the bourgeois specialists we need a watchdog—the RKI—the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.

Then, of course, the local Party committee—that matchless defender of the workers’ interests—wasn’t dozing either. And Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only Communists at leadership level; and the wisdom of this view was confirmed by the given trial.”5 The Moscow Party organization also kept its eyes on the water-supply system. (And behind it stood the Cheka.) “In our own time we built our army on the basis of a healthy feeling of class enmity; in its name, we do not entrust even one responsible position to people who do not belong to our camp, without assigning them . . . a commissar.”6 And so, they all immediately began to order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around without his knowledge. (“They broke up the whole nest of businessmen.”)

Oldenborger made so bold as to describe as stupid stubbornness the actions of the new chief of the water-supply system, Zenyuk (to Krylenko, “a profoundly likable person on the basis of his internal structure”).

elections to the Moscow Soviet were being held and the workers nominated Oldenborger as the candidate of the water-supply system, against whom, of course, the Party cell backed its own Party candidate. However, this turned out to be futile because of the chief engineer’s fraudulent authority with the workers. Nonetheless, the Party cell brought up the question with the District Party Committee, on all levels, and announced at a general meeting that “Oldenborger is the center and soul of sabotage, and will be our political enemy in the Moscow Soviet!” The workers responded with an uproar and shouts of “Untrue! Lies!” And at that point the secretary of the Party Committee, Comrade Sedelnikov, flung right in the faces of the thousand-headed proletariat there: “I am not even going to talk to such Black Hundred, reactionary pogrom-makers.” That is to say: We’ll talk to you somewhere else.

And for the fourth year the water kept right on flowing through the pipes. And Moscovites kept on drinking it and didn’t notice anything wrong. Then Comrade Sedelnikov wrote an article for the newspaper Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn: “In view of the rumors disturbing the public in regard to the catastrophic state of the water mains . . .” and he reported many new and alarming rumors—even that the water system was pumping water underground and was intentionally washing away the foundations of all Moscow.” (Set there by Ivan Kalita in the fourteenth century.) They summoned a Commission of the Moscow Soviet. The Commission found that the “state of the water system was satisfactory and that its technical direction was efficient.” Oldenborger denied all the accusations.

What remained for the leaders of the workers to do at this point? What was the final, infallible method? A denunciation to the Cheka! Sedelnikov resorted to just that! He “painted a picture of the conscious wrecking of the water system by Oldenborger.” He did not have the slightest doubt that “a counterrevolutionary organization” existed “in the water system, in the heart of Red Moscow.” And, furthermore, a catastrophic situation at the Rublevo water tower!

They had refused to authorize his order for new boilers from abroad—and at the time, in Russia, it was quite impossible to fix the old ones. So Oldenborger committed suicide. (It had been just too much for one man—after all, he hadn’t undergone the conditioning for that sort of thing.)

So there was a trial in the Supreme Tribunal. Krylenko was moderately severe. Krylenko was moderately merciless. He was understanding: “The Russian worker, of course, was right to see in every person not of his own class someone more likely to be an enemy than a friend.”7

the workers who testified against Comrade Sedelnikov and the RKI men were “easily brushed off” by the tribunal. And the defendant Sedelnikov replied brazenly to the threats of the accuser. “Comrade Krylenko! I know all those articles. But after all, no one is judging class enemies here, and those articles relate to class enemies.”

Sedelnikov, allegedly, got one year in jail. You will just have to forgive me if I don’t believe it.

The coming church trials were internal. They didn’t interest progressive Europe. And they could be conducted without a code. We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separation of church and state was so construed by the state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart.

At the end of the Civil War, and as its natural consequence, an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area. They give it only two lines in the official histories because it doesn’t add a very ornamental touch to the wreaths of the victors in that war. But the famine existed nonetheless—to the point of cannibalism, to the point at which parents ate their own children—such a famine as even Russia had never known, even in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century.

V. G. Korolenko, in his Letters to Lunacharsky (which, despite Lunacharsky’s promise, were never officially published in the Soviet Union),11 explains to us Russia’s total, epidemic descent into famine and destitution. It was the result of productivity having been reduced to zero (the working hands were all carrying guns) and the result, also, of the peasants’ utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest part of the harvest might be left for them. Yes, and someday someone will also count up those many carloads of food supplies rolling on and on for many, many months to Imperial Germany, under the terms of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk—from a Russia which had been deprived of a protesting voice, from the very provinces where famine would strike—so that Germany could fight to the end in the West.

But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous! 1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the church. 2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches. 3. In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.

in August, 1921, at the beginning of the famine, the church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starving and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any direct help to go straight from the church into the mouths of those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. The committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state treasury.

Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the soles of shoes, and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in December, 1921, Pomgol—the State Commission for Famine Relief—proposed that the churches help the starving by donating church valuables—not all, but those not required for liturgical rites. The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must be strictly voluntary! On Febraury 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued a pastoral letter permitting the parish councils to make gifts of objects that did not have liturgical and ritual significance.

A decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on February 26: all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches—for the starving! The Patriarch wrote to Kalinin, who did not reply. Then on February 28 the Patriarch issued a new, fateful pastoral letter: from the church’s point of view such a measure is sacrilege, and we cannot approve the requisition.

right then and there a sure-fire campaign of persecution began in the papers, directed against the Patriarch and high church authorities who were strangling the Volga region with the bony hand of famine. And the more firmly the Patriarch clung to his position, the weaker it became. In March a movement to relinquish the valuables, to come to an agreement with the government, began even among the clergy.

In Petrograd things seemed to be working out peacefully. The atmosphere at the session of the Petrograd Pomgol on March 5, 1922, was even joyful, according to the testimony of an eyewitness. Veniamin announced: “The Orthodox Church is prepared to give everything to help the starving.” It saw sacrilege only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was unnecessary! Kanatchikov, Chairman of the Petrograd Pomgol, gave his assurances that this would produce a favorable attitude toward the church on the part of the Soviet government. (Not very likely, that!)

The newspaper Petrogradskaya Pravda, in its issues of March 8, 9, and 10,12 confirmed the peaceful, successful outcome of the talks, and spoke favorably of the Metropolitan. “In Smolny they agreed that the church vessels and ikon coverings would be melted down into ingots in the presence of the believers.” Again things were getting fouled up with some kind of compromise! The noxious fumes of Christianity were poisoning the revolutionary will. That kind of unity and that way of handing over the valuables were not what the starving people of the Volga needed! The spineless membership of the Petrograd Pomgol was changed. The newspapers began to howl about the “evil pastors” and “princes of the church,” and the representatives of the church were told: “We don’t need your donations! And there won’t be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government—and the government will take whatever it considers necessary.” And so forcible requisitions, accompanied by strife, began in Petrograd, as they did everywhere else. And this provided the legal basis for initiating trials of the clergy.13

H. The Moscow Church Trial—April 26-May 7, 1922

Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church.) On May 5 Patriarch Tikhon was summoned to the tribunal as a witness. Even though the public was represented only by a carefully selected audience (1922, in this respect, differing little from 1937 and 1968), nonetheless the stamp of Old Russia was still so deep, and the Soviet stamp was still so superficial, that on the Patriarch’s entrance more than half of those present rose to receive his blessing.

The Presiding Judge: “Referring to the fact that the decree was published while you were in the midst of talks with Pomgol, you used the expression, behind your back?” The Patriarch: “Yes.” Presiding Judge: “You therefore consider that the Soviet government acted incorrectly?” A crushing argument! It will be repeated a million times more in the nighttime offices of interrogators! And we will never answer as simply and straightforwardly as: The Patriarch: “Yes.” The Presiding Judge: “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?” The Patriarch: “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety” (Oh, if only everyone had answered just that way! Our whole history would have been different.)

Then there is a discussion of the term “blasphemy.” While they were requisitioning the valuables from the church of St. Basil the Great of Caesarea, the ikon cover would not fit into a box, and at that point they trampled it with their feet. But the Patriarch himself had not been present. The Accuser: “How do you know that? Give us the name of the priest who told you that. [And we will arrest him immediately!]” The Patriarch does not give the name. That means it was a lie! The Accuser presses on triumphantly: “No, who spread that repulsive slander?” The Presiding Judge: “Give us the names of those who trampled the ikon cover! [One can assume that after doing it they left their visiting cards!] Otherwise the tribunal cannot believe you!” The Patriarch cannot name them. The Presiding Judge: “That means you have made an unsubstantiated assertion.” It still remained to be proved that the Patriarch wanted to overthrow the Soviet government. And here is how it was proved: “Propaganda is an attempt to prepare a mood preliminary to preparing a revolt in the future.” The tribunal ordered criminal charges to be brought against the Patriarch. On May 7 sentence was pronounced: of the seventeen defendants, eleven were to be shot. (They actually shot five.) As Krylenko said: “We didn’t come here just to crack jokes.”

I. The Petrograd Church Trial—June 9-July 5, 1922

Most of the spectators in the court were Red Army men, but even they rose every time the Metropolitan entered in his white ecclesiastical hood. Yet the accuser and the tribunal called him an enemy of the people. Let us note that this term already existed.

the tribunal actually ordered the imprisonment of a witness, Professor Yegorov, because of his testimony on behalf of the Metropolitan. As it turned out, Yegorov was quite prepared for this. He had a thick briefcase with him in which he had packed food, underwear, and even a small blanket. The reader can observe that the court was gradually assuming forms familiar to us.

Let us make use of a rather rare opportunity to cite several sentences that have been preserved from the speech of S. Y. Gurovich, who was the Metropolitan’s defense attorney. “There are no proofs of guilt. There are no facts. There is not even an indictment. . . . What will history say? [Oh, he certainly had discovered how to frighten them! History will forget and say nothing!] The requisition of church valuables in Petrograd took place in a complete calm, but here the Petrograd clergy is on the defendants’ bench, and somebody’s hands keep pushing them toward death. The basic principle which you stress is the good of the Soviet government. But do not forget that the church will be nourished by the blood of martyrs. [Not in the Soviet Union, though!] There is nothing more to be said, but it is hard to stop talking. While the debate lasts, the defendants are alive. When the debate comes to an end, life will end too.” The tribunal condemned ten of them to death. They waited more than a month for their execution, until the trial of the SR’s had ended. (It was as though they had processed them in order to shoot them at the same time as the SR’s.) And after that, VTsIK, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, pardoned six of them. And four of them—the Metropolitan Veniamin; the Archimandrite Sergius, a former member of the State Duma; Professor of Law Y. P. Novitsky; and the barrister Kovsharov—were shot on the night of August 12–13.

They were in a big hurry to produce a Criminal Code in time for the trial of the SR’s—the Socialist Revolutionaries. The time had come to set in place the granite foundation stones of the Law. On May 12, as had been agreed, the session of VTsIK convened, but the projected Code had not yet been completed. It had only just been delivered for analysis to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his Gorki estate outside Moscow. Six articles of the Code provided for execution by shooting as the maximum punishment. This was unsatisfactory. On May 15, on the margins of the draft Code, Lenin added six more articles requiring execution by shooting (including—under Article 69—propaganda and agitation, particularly in the form of an appeal for passive resistance to the government and mass rejection of the obligations of military service or tax payments).14 And one other crime that called for execution by shooting: unauthorized return from abroad (my, how the socialists all used to bob back and forth incessantly!). And there was one punishment that was the equivalent of execution by shooting: exile abroad. Vladimir Ilyich foresaw a time not far distant when there would be a constant rush of people to the Soviet Union from Europe, and it would be impossible to get anyone voluntarily to leave the Soviet Union for the West.

We have no way of knowing what took place during their conversation. But following it up, on May 17, Lenin sent a second letter from Gorki: COMRADE KURSKY! As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code. . . . The basic concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits. The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice. With Communist greetings, LENIN17

Everything was inserted as required; it was retyped; execution by shooting was extended—and the session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the new Criminal Code shortly after May 20 and decreed it to be in effect from June 1, 1922, on.

J. Trial of the SR’s—June 8-August 7, 1922

If my readers and I were not already sufficiently informed to know that what was important in every trial was not the charges brought nor guilt, so called, but expediency, we would perhaps not be prepared to accept this trial wholeheartedly. But expediency works without fail: the SR’s, as opposed to the Mensheviks, were considered still dangerous, not yet dispersed and broken up, not yet finished off. And on behalf of the fortress of the newly created dictatorship (the proletariat), it was expedient to finish them off. Someone unfamiliar with this principle might mistakenly view the entire trial as an act of Party vengeance.

With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

Now the first charge against them was that the SR’s had initiated the Civil War! Yes, they began it, they had begun it. They were accused of armed resistance to the October seizure of power. When the Provisional Government, which they supported and which was in part made up of their members, was lawfully swept out of office by the machine-gun fire of the sailors, the SR’s tried altogether illegally to defend it,

The second charge against them was that they had deepened the abyss of the Civil War by taking part in demonstrations—by this token, rebellions—on January 5 and 6, 1918, against the lawful authority of the workers’ and peasants’ government.

The third charge was that they had not recognized the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that lawful, lifesaving peace of Brest-Litovsk, which had cut off not Russia’s head but only parts of its torso.

From this followed the serious fourth charge: in the summer and fall of 1918, those final months and weeks when the Kaiser’s Germany was scarcely managing to hold its own against the Allies, and the Soviet government, faithful to the Brest treaty, was supporting Germany in its difficult struggle with trainloads of foodstuffs and a monthly tribute in gold, the SR’s traitorously prepared (well, they didn’t actually prepare anything but, as was their custom, did more talking about it than anything—but what if they really had!) to blow up the railroad tracks in front of one such train, thus keeping the gold in the Motherland. In other words, they “prepared criminal destruction of our public wealth, the railroads.”

From this fourth charge a fifth followed inexorably: the SR’s had intended to procure the technical equipment for such an explosion with money received from Allied representatives. (They had wanted to take money from the Entente in order not to give gold away to Kaiser Wilhelm.) And this was the extreme of treason!